Dear Editor,
As one who seeks an elevation of the public discourse in this nation, I have been repeatedly disappointed by some of the essays published on your editorial page, but the recent column (7-29-15) by Tina Dupuy regarding Donald Trump sets a new mark for divisiveness, snarkiness, and outright lies.
To begin with, she likens Republicans to a cult, and then goes downhill from there. She quotes from a book that has never been heard of, and then tries to gain credibility for this “classic” source by asserting that the term “cognitive dissonance” originated in this revered tome. I guess we’ll have to take her word for that, which might be foolish considering the palpable lies that permeate this piece.
For instance, she says it seems that everyone agrees that Trump is bad for the GOP. Huh? There is a large percentage of Republicans ready to vote for him. That is millions of people Ms. Dupuy, but in your mind, that must be merely a rounding error.
Next paragraph, she informs us Trump is not the cause of the GOP’s problems, but just a symptom. Not exactly a lie, but a stupid assertion unless she can make a persuasive case, which she doesn’t.
Then we are treated to a rehearsal of Ms. Dupuy’s flawed version of recent history, which is to blame the great recession on the tax cuts of the Bush administration. Sorry to disabuse the true believers on the left, but while those tax cuts, and the excess spending of the Bush years did contribute to the national debt (to the astonished anger of most conservatives), the recession was caused by the near collapse of our banking system. To quickly review, that was caused by the sub-prime loans that were pushed (hard) by the Democrats, and the repeal of Glass-Stiegel in the Clinton years. The national debt that was worsened in the Bush years, and more than doubled under Obama, has yet to explode as the crisis it will become.
Compounding her lie about the cause of the recession, she quickly implies that even after nearly seven years of the Obama administration, any problem with the economy is certainly not his fault. I always wonder how he can dodge his first year assurance that if he got his stimulus package (which he did) the economy would be in recovery in one year. The response is it was worse than he thought. So, he didn’t know what he was talking about back then, huh? As far as can be determined by the current state of the economy, he still doesn’t.
But Ms. Dupuy wasn’t done. She then went on to misinform us that the Tea Party began as some kind of cult minded doubling down on that same Bush era agenda. Sorry, but I was there. It was the aforementioned astonishment at the free spending ways of the Republican establishment combined with disgust at the anemic response of that same establishment to the imposition of socialized medicine that is, in her words, the “best explanation” for the Tea Party.
You might think that would be all, but the talented Ms. Dupuy managed to include a couple of buckets of barely coherent and totally irrelevant slime to hurl at Sarah Palin. I guess she had to get a sure fire laugh from her base to qualify as a comic, but I prefer jokes that actually contain humor.
All in all, this divisive and misleading drivel looked better as a dead tree.                                          
Steven C. Flanders    
Larned